"America has two great dominant strands of political thought - conservatism,
which, at its very best, draws lines that should not be crossed;
and progressivism, which, at its very best, breaks down barriers that
should never have been erected."
-- Bill Clinton, Dedication of the Clinton Presidential Library, November 2004

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Council on Foreign Relations speech summary

The campaign released a memo to reporters on the speech that Gov. Dean gave to the CFR today. In it, they summarized the message's key points as well as the foreign policy of a Dean Administration. The key points:

- Our foreign and military policy must restore American leadership in the world. We need to turn back to policies that have America leading the world rather than pitting America against the world.

- We should not be dividing the world into us versus them, but rallying the world around fundamental principles of decency, responsibility, freedom and mutual respect.

- We must lead by example, not by force; we must continue to be the light unto the nations - setting a moral example through our behavior.

- While we must be prepared and ready to use force, it must be to defend against actual or imminent threat to ourselves or our friends and allies and, in concert with others, to deal with grave humanitarian crises.

- The Bush administration has abandoned a principle that has guided us for 225 years: that preemptive force should be used only against an imminent threat. This administration has changed that policy and made the world a more dangerous - not a safer - place.

The Dean foreign policy:

In restoring principled and multilateral American leadership, Dean's foreign policy would seek to achieve four goals:

(1) Defeat the threat posed by terrorists, tyrants and technologies of mass destruction - but by working with others, not alone.

(2) Strengthen bonds with other countries - conducting foreign policy by posse is short-sighted; our destinies are all intertwined

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About Nation-Building

Nation-Building was founded by Aziz Poonawalla in August 2002 under the name Dean Nation. Dean Nation was the very
first weblog devoted to a presidential candidate, Howard Dean, and became the vanguard of the Dean netroot phenomenon, raising
over $40,000 for the Dean campaign, pioneering the use of Meetup, and enjoying the attention of the campaign itself, with Joe Trippi
a regular reader (and sometime commentor). Howard Dean himself even left a comment once. Dean Nation was a group weblog effort and counts
among its alumni many of the progressive blogsphere's leading talent including Jerome Armstrong, Matthew Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. After
the election in 2004, the blog refocused onto the theme of "purple politics",
formally changing its name to Nation-Building in June 2006.
The primary focus of the blog is on articulating
purple-state policy at home and
pragmatic liberal interventionism abroad.